Law of Fortuitous Reversals

Musings prompted by the serendipitous near simultaneous reading of How Moral Education Is Finding Its Way Back into America’s Schools by Christina Hoff Sommers, Dan Quayle Was Right by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, and Two Classes, Divided by ‘I Do’ by Jason DeParle.

Most of our public speakers and pundits seem unable to keep two thoughts in their minds at a single time – that life can be understood both as a snapshot in time and as a process of continuity. Actions taken to further one’s goals in the here-and-now can work against one’s simultaneously held desires for the future. Likewise, all of the present can be sacrificed to the ends of some distant future that never arrives. Success is the wise balancing of those competing goals between present and future which occur in an environment rife with repeated and unexpected exogenous shocks; such shocks confounding our best laid plans.

Heuristics, knowledge and narrative structures feeding in to a sophisticated decision-making process helps us navigate the terrain of the present. Profound knowledge/wisdom helps us prioritize those present actions and goals so that they also support our future goals, all of which are contingent on productivity and which are based on survival and continuity.

Analytic knowledge, as a consequence of empiricism, the scientific method and the tradition of rationalism, has grown at an exponential rate. Narrative knowledge likewise, with the printing press, tradition of freedom and accelerating technology development (radio, telephone, internet, etc.), has also exploded. Yes there are still classics but there are literally hundreds of thousands of narratives new each year to which people can expose themselves. Heuristics, being knowledge accumulated through simple trial and error, is fairly static. Accumulated Profound knowledge (philosophy and religion) is, like heuristics, evolutionary in nature. An unexpected insight here, a variation there, slowly demonstrating their value by their capacity to help not just individuals but groups of individuals (cultures) to weather the constant and repeated exogenous shocks to win through survival and continuity.

So what are the elements of philosophy and religion which facilitate cultural survival and continuity? Ay, there’s the rub. And there’s the opportunity. We have spent two generations shying away from the brutal reality that some cultural constructs do a better job of facilitating productivity than others and some do a better job of integrating productivity with survival and continuity than others. It is no good simply getting richer, if in doing so, you lose your future.

Thoughts sparked by Christina Hoff Sommers in How Moral Education Is Finding Its Way Back into America’s Schools . Her argument has a greater tendency towards rhetoric over logic and evidence but I think she is addressing an important topic. What is overlooked is the challenge presented of trying to incorporate evidenced-based values (what values are associated with productivity, survival and continuity and what are the mechanisms by which those values achieve productivity, survival and continuity) into a heterogeneous society where some sub-cultures adhere to patterns of values and behavior which are deleterious to their long term well-being. It is not an easy question to answer, particularly when a disproportionate number of our intellectuals are wedded to overthrowing eternal varieties in pursuit of the bauble of cognitive celebrity for professing some untenable but novel proposition.

She ends on an optimistic note.

Social critics often refer to the Law of Unintended Consequences. According to this law, seemingly benign social or political changes often have unfortunate, even disastrous, side effects. Few romantic idealists of the 1920s and 1930s, for example, had any idea that applying utopian principles to real societies might cause their total degradation. Nor did anyone in the 1970s expect that applying Rousseau’s perspective to moral education would set children adrift, denying to them the essential guidance they need in life. Fortunately, a Law of Fortuitous Reversals
also operates in social life. According to this second law, when bad, unintended consequences seem irreparable, the situation suddenly improves dramatically. One fortuitous reversal was the rapid, unforeseen disintegration of the Soviet system a decade ago. Another, just under way, is the unexpected return of Aristotelian common sense in the moral education of American children.